Data, Politics And Television: Lessons Learned From The First Republican Debate

The first Republican presidential debate seen on a television monitor in the media filing center. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Today’s political campaigning has become synonymous with the “big data” revolution. The data-driven campaigning that drove Barack Obama into the White House in 2008 and again in 2012 reinvented how campaigns make use of their vast archives of voter information. Mass media, especially television, is still a critical medium for reaching voters, with a June 2015 Pew poll finding that television is still a dominate source of political news for 37% to 60% of Americans. This got the Internet Archive interested in using its Television News Archive of more than 750,000 domestic and foreign television shows back to 2009 to better understand television coverage of American politics and how campaigns leverage and are affected by this coverage, which we will be applying to today’s Republican debate.

Last month I collaborated with the Archive to apply audio fingerprinting technology from the Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio at Columbia University to scan major U.S. and international television networks over the week following the August 6, 2015 first Republican debate and identify every time a soundbite from the debate was broadcast on another television show. In this way we were able to construct a catalog of every rebroadcast of any of the candidates’ responses to determine whose soundbites “went viral.”

You can see the results for yourself, including the actual video clips, through the interactive debate visualizers we created: one for the “prime” debate and one for the “undercard” debate.

Carly Fiorina was the clear winner of the undercard debate, accounting for 45% of the soundbites from the debate that aired over the following week, with Rick Perry a distant second at just 15.7%. The two most-rebroadcast quotes from the debate were both hers: “Hillary Clinton lies about Benghazi, she lies about emails. She is still defending Planned Parenthood, and she is still her party’s front runner” and “Did any of you get a phone call from Bill Clinton? I didn’t. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t given money to the foundation or donated to his wife’s Senate campaign.”

Trump’s responses in the prime debate were the most frequently rebroadcast in the subsequent week, accounting for 30.7% of excerpts, with Rand Paul and Chris Christie neck-and-neck for second/third place at 14.1% and 13.7%, respectively. Trump’s refusal to rule out running as an Independent and his Twitter comments were the most-aired comments from the debate, followed by Rand Paul and Chris Christie’s exchange about the fourth amendment and Paul’s now-famous quote “I know you gave [President Obama] a big hug, and if you want to give him a big hug again, go right ahead.” In a foreshadowing of his recent rise in Republican polls, Ben Carson’s closing remarks were the most-repeated of any candidate.

Breaking the candidates down by television network, Roger MacDonald, Director of the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, created the graph below that shows what percentage of the rebroadcasts of soundbites from the debate were from each candidate. While “fair” is a relative term, the graph below certainly suggests that FOX News was among the most “balanced” in its coverage of the debate, airing a fairly even distribution of soundbites from across the pool of prime debate candidates. On the other hand, MSNBC and CNN were the most imbalanced in favor of Trump, while Univision focused 68% of its excerpts on statements by Trump and Rubio. Al Jazeera America was the only station to prioritize another candidate’s statements over Trump, focusing on Rand Paul’s arguments about government surveillance.

Percent of rebroadcast soundbites from First Republican Prime Debate from each candidate by television network (courtesy Roger MacDonald) (Earlier version was missing Cruz in legend, but all charts were correct)

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania was part of a bipartisan working group that submitted recommendations earlier this year for reforming the format of presidential debates. A key tenet of their recommendations was that audience participation from those physically present at the debate venue be eliminated. In the case of the August 6th Republican debate, the moderators actually encouraged the home audience to register their opinions, with “somewhere between a reaction to a LeBron James dunk and the Cleveland Public Library across the street.” At Dr. Jameson’s request the Internet Archive manually reviewed the full prime debate and created a "supercut" containing every instance of audience reaction.

The prime time debate lasted 119 minutes and 46 seconds from the first question to the last answer. Subtracting the 17 minutes and 6 seconds of commercials and FOX-provided intro and outro statements, the actual debate itself lasted 102 minutes and 40 seconds. Of this, an incredible 24 minutes and 48 seconds (23%) of the prime time debate included audience reactions from thundering cheers to boisterous boos. Thus, nearly a quarter of the entire debate was overprinted by the home audience in the stadium reacting to the candidates’ statements. This stands to have a substantial potential impact on how viewers at home perceive the candidates, with the Annenberg recommendations above noting that “the only major published study of general election debate audience reactions showed that they are able to affect viewers’ perceptions of a candidate.”

Stay tuned, as the Internet Archive and I will be producing a similar set of analyses for this evening's second Republican debate, to come out this Friday!

Based in Washington, DC, I founded my first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, and have spent the last 20 years working to reimagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never befor...